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Vox today released the 2024 Future Perfect 50 list, its third annual celebration of the thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are working to make the future a better place. This year’s project is Vox’s most ambitious yet, including dedicated profiles of each honoree and interviews with a select few. The Future Perfect 50 includes both […]

While campaigning, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to dismantle the US Department of Education (DOE), on the basis that the federal education apparatus is “indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material.”  “One thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, DC, and […]

Welcome to Know-It-All. In the age of intellectual property grabs, docudramas, and so very many sequels, it can be difficult to find a way into the complicated worlds we see on screen. In this series, Vox experts explain what you need to know to get into the latest hot release. Like a friendship between a […]

During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump had a pointed tagline for his energy policy: “Drill, baby, drill.” That statement is emblematic of where Trump is poised to focus his efforts in a second term: He’s pledged US “energy dominance” and everything from “new pipelines” to “new refiners” that amp up fossil fuel production.  This approach […]

Long before he officially pursued the presidency, Donald Trump railed against US trade deals. In interviews dating back to the 1980s, he told journalists that deals that benefited Asian and Middle Eastern trading partners consistently “ripped off” the US.  Over decades, that charge may have turned into a winning election strategy. As a first-term president […]

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Democratic lawmakers and reproductive rights advocates have maintained a clear strategy: Win a more progressive Democratic trifecta in 2024, eliminate the Senate filibuster, and pass comprehensive federal protections. When reporters asked about contingency plans — particularly given polls suggesting full Democratic control was unlikely — such questions were […]

If the popular song is to be believed, there’s no place like home for the holidays.  But getting there is going to cost you. Americans plan to spend an average of $2,330 on holiday travel this year, according to NerdWallet’s 2024 Holiday Spending Report. Factor in another $900 on gifts, per the report, and hundreds […]

Vox reader Jen Hawse asks: Why do hotels pump in very strongly smelling perfume into their lobbies and sometimes their guest rooms? What we think of as a “nice” hotel often comes down to a certain je ne sais quoi. Sure, it has all the amenities — a luxe restaurant and bar on the premises, […]

Did you donate to charity in the past, but no longer do so?  If the answer is yes, you’re not alone. For the second year in a row, the philanthropy research foundation Giving USA reported that fewer Americans are donating to nonprofits than they used to, and the total amount of giving is declining once […]

Nearly three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine, the Biden administration gave Ukraine the green light to strike deeper into Russia using US-supplied longer-range missiles. The Ukrainian military quickly put that permission to use: On Tuesday, it attacked a weapons depot about 70 miles from Ukraine’s border.  The US and NATO allies have hesitated […]

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, a 900-page opus of conservative policy recommendations published by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. But he has nominated two of the document’s co-authors to Cabinet-level positions, and many others served in his first administration, which suggests the document may be a window into […]

There’s a pretty widespread consensus about which issue was most responsible for Kamala Harris’s defeat: inflation. There’s much less consensus on what, if anything, Democrats could have done differently about it. Polls have been clear for years that voters were irate about the inflation that occurred under the Biden administration — the highest in decades. […]

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Lynne Randall doesn’t buy all the toys that show up at her house. They just kind of happen. There’s the play kitchen her 3-year-old son inherited from his cousins. There’s the “random stuff” her mother-in-law buys online, all […]

On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance did not sound like guys likely to support foreign aid spending. Vance would rail against Kamala Harris, who he alleged “taxed money from the American taxpayer, sent it off to China and to foreign regimes all over the world.” (It’s not clear what […]

It will soon be Giving Tuesday, and it’s time for me to do what I do on Vox every Giving Tuesday: encourage people to give more money to effective charities. Over years of doing this, I’ve gotten a long and familiar list of objections. I decided this year to try my best to answer them. […]

There’s always been a saying, an expression of exaggerated exasperation, that’s irked me: “What do you get for the person who has everything?”  The fundamental flaw of that question is that it ignores a very important fact: The person who has everything is probably rich, and you should never feel all that burdened about what […]

The holidays are ostensibly a time to gather with loved ones and celebrate cherished traditions, whether that be over turkey (or a turkey trot!) for Thanksgiving or Chinese food or murderous lullabies on Christmas. Unfortunately for many of us, the season has also become a time of high financial stress. One survey found that 2 […]

It was last fall, in the midst of preparing to host Thanksgiving for the first time in my Brooklyn apartment, that I became obsessed with a woman on TikTok who was, in all respects, doing it much, much better than me.  For days, my feed filled up with Cecilia Tolone’s adventures in preparing a Friendsgiving […]

There’s a beloved tale you might be familiar with about selflessness, and how it embodies the spirit of the holiday season: from the 1999 Disney direct-to-video film Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas, a vignette titled “Mickey and Minnie’s Gift of the Magi.” (Reportedly, there are other versions too.) In the film, Mickey and Minnie are […]

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here is a Vox reader’s question, […]

Ever since Game of Thrones ended in 2019 — and what a horrible little ending it was — there’s been a seemingly never-ending quest to find the “next Game of Thrones.” What that means is two-fold: a series that captures Game of Thrones’s extensive, fantasy world-building and the drama of political succession and a show […]

In 2004, life as a Democrat was pretty bleak. The party lost a presidential election to George W. Bush for a second time. Adding insult to injury, Democratic nominee John Kerry lost the popular vote. The party was seemingly losing ground, after having won the popular vote in 2000 and losing the Electoral College thanks […]

After last week’s presidential election, something unusual started happening in my neighborhood: On a walk to a wine bar on November 11, I saw stoops lined with pine garlands next to skeletons and spider webs, relics from Halloween a mere week and a half prior. Someone had set up two life-size nutcrackers on their front […]

With President-elect Donald Trump’s latest slate of extreme or controversial nominees — Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary — has come the question about whether even a Republican-controlled Senate will […]